Architects do matter, Mr Gove

The education secretary claims architects have 'creamed off' money that could have gone to teachers. It's time he opened his eyes to the far-reaching benefits of a beautifully designed school

The Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, has been using a new building designed by Penoyre & Prasad for four years. In that time, results and pupils' behaviour have improved. Photograph: Helene Binet Helene Binet /Public Domain

If Michael Gove were a building, he would leak. He would crack and crumble on faulty foundations. He would be windy, but also overheat. Behind a pretentious facade, he would be shoddy in design and execution.

So far, the secretary of state for education has had to apologise for the hasty and inaccurate way he announced the cancellation of school building projects, and been told by a judge that his failure to consult was "so unfair as to amount to an abuse of power". He keeps giving not-quite-true information to Parliament, for example that a college in Doncaster, a pilot project of the government, took an impressively short 10 weeks to procure. It actually took 22 weeks.

On 14 February he told the House of Commons that "it's a scandal… millions of pounds were spent on consultants" on the design of new schools. "One individual, in one year, made more than £1m as a result of his endeavours." This might be an impressive fact, were it not that he is referring to a case in Birmingham in which the sum was £700,000, was paid over four years and covered the work of five advisers at different times, as part of a programme of more than 80 schools, costing more than £1 billion.

Yet Gove presses on, seemingly untroubled by evidence, common sense or decency, with his campaign to lower the quality of the buildings in which the nation's children are taught. He has repeatedly attacked architects for "creaming off" money that could be better spent on teaching. He recently smirked to a conference that "we won't be getting any award-winning architects" to design new schools, "because no one in this room is here to make architects richer". The message is that a well-designed environment is an irrelevance: teaching is all that matters.

There has been talk that schools can be churned out in bulk, the way Tesco builds its supermarket or McDonald's its outlets. To dot the country with standardised McSchools is not obviously consistent with the government's localism agenda, or its interest in a "happiness index", but never mind. One contractor, Willmott Dixon, has punted some suggestions as to what such schools might look like. These look plausible, if drab, on unencumbered, level sites. But, like Daleks encountering a staircase, they need help when they hit a slope, or a constrained urban site, or the individual needs of particular schools. Standardisation has its uses, but it needs design to do well.

One of Willmott Dixon’s designs for a standardised primary school.

To Gove's rejection of design, Phil Blinston, executive head of the Minster School in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, says: "It's bizarre. I just don't get it. Why wouldn't we want to factor in everything architects have learned from other buildings? Youngsters are growing up visually articulate. Why would they not expect to see that in school? Why would you expect them to lower their standards?"

The Minster School has been using an award-winning building for four years, designed by architects Penoyre & Prasad. Blinston says: "Our results were good and continued to rise with the new building. Our behaviour has improved." It has good acoustics and natural light, which "have a profound effect on the emotional state of children, which helps their learning".

Its circulation works smoothly, without "one-way systems, keep left signs or massive numbers of rules". Hidden spaces "where vulnerable kids fear to tread" are designed out, so you don't need "people standing guard". It is designed so that locals can use the building in evenings and school holidays, so this public asset is used to the full.

"I'm not talking about fancy architecture," he says – and a limited budget means the school has a simple-going-on-basic look – "but it's about enabling people to feel good. Good design produces a relaxed community. If we say education is important, we can demonstrate that by putting children in decent environments." Buildings cannot do a teacher's job, in other words, but they can make good teaching better and bad teaching less so.

To which it might be added that, if environment were irrelevant to learning, then Eton College, the alma mater of many of the present government, would sell its agreeable slab of Berkshire real estate and move to low-cost units in a business park in Slough.

Gove is very much right about one thing, which is that the last government's £55bn Building Schools for the Future programme, which aimed to rebuild or renew nearly every secondary school in the country, was a monstrously wasteful and cumbersome process, which often led to very poorly designed schools. The "creaming off", however, was not being done by architects, who were, instead, among the first to point out the faults of the programme.

The main beneficiaries were the financial institutions and their advisers who funded the programme, who will earn handsome returns and bonuses for years to come at the taxpayers' expense. They are followed by the big construction companies, several of which were fined in 2008 by the Office of Fair Trading for breach of competition law – ie price-fixing – on a range of project types. They were, to coin a phrase, creaming off the funds of clients, including local authorities.

This unfortunate blemish has not impeded the same companies from securing huge education contracts, and it would be stretching credulity to think that price-fixing never now happens in school building. Yet there has been no ministerial slap. Rather, Gove's architect-free vision of the future places ever-greater reliance on the men with the hard hats, the handshakes and the plausible paperwork.

There are also the lawyers who expensively write and rewrite the byzantine contracts, at hourly rates several times greater than architects', and project managers, who do less, and less useful work than architects for a similar total cost. Worst of all was the waste inherent in BSF's processes: it cost contractors up to £3m to bid for a package of schools. They would expect to win one in three, meaning that they would want to recover £9m from successful bids just to cover their bidding costs.

Gove's department is unable to produce the figures on which he makes his assertions, saying that "detailed data on individual projects was held locally to minimise the regulatory burden on projects and project reporting". It is, however, possible to find out that architects' fees have been between 2.5% and 5% of construction cost. If capital costs other than construction are included, this can drop to well under 2% of the total. If, as happened under BSF, future running costs are included in the contract, architects' fees become a tiny proportion. Most architects working on schools will tell you that it pays less well than almost any other kind of work and is sometimes loss-making. One says that schools work "is threatening to put us out of business".

In other words, in the torrents of waste surrounding school building, good architects are value for money. If budgets get tighter, we will need their skills to make the most of them. If, as seems likely, future work is more about refurbishment rather than glamorous new buildings, architects' adaptability will help. If there is more standardisation of new buildings, it needs design intelligence to do it well. Gove seems to think that architects are all bow-tied ponces longing only to inflict their fantasies on the public. They could be his greatest allies.